The gospel has an impact on every aspect of our lives.

When we become followers of Jesus, that transforms what we value, what we think of as important,

including how we spend our time and our money.

And as a result,

not everyone sees the gospel as good news. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg examines the mixed responses to the Apostle Paul's preaching of the gospel in Ephesus.

I invite you to turn, if you would, to the portion of scripture that was read earlier from Acts 19. Now, before we look at the Bible together, before we turn to the word of the Lord, we turn to the Lord of the Word.

O Lord, you have given us your word, as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.

We pray now that by the Holy Spirit the light may shine out in such a way that we both understand and heed what it says.

We are entirely dependent upon you for this, and it is to you alone that we look,

and we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, we've set ourselves the task of following Paul on the

tail end of his missionary journey, a journey that is going to take him by the time we get to the

final verses of Acts,

to the city of Rome itself, and it will be there that he takes his leave of us. We have been

looking at chapter 19 and have discovered that what we have here is, if you like, a synopsis

of a tremendous amount of time and a great deal of material.

Paul spent longer in Ephesus than he did in any other city, at least as Luke records it for us,

and indeed much of what he refers to in First and Second Corinthians concerning his imprisonment

and various factors in his life probably took place

during his time in Ephesus. But what Luke does for us in Chapter 19 is essentially

provide a series of four pictures with, if you like, comments that are interwoven between them. And I like to think in terms

of pictures, as you know, and some of you do too. And the first picture that he is essentially

provided for us, which we saw a couple of weeks ago, was a picture of about 12 men. There in verse 7,

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